George Padmore, born in Trinidad, was a leading Pan-Africanist, journalist, and author.
It was from a small flat in Somers Town that George Padmore helped change the world.
George Padmore born in Trinidad, when it was still part of the British West Indies, lived in Somers Town at 22 Cranleigh St, from 1941 to 1957, with partner and collaborator Dorothy Pizer.
Padmore was an author and journalist arguing the cause of Pan-Africanism and independence from colonial rule. In 1957, he became political adviser to Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah, who he encountered in London.The writer and activist, who lived in Cranleigh Street, was instrumental in helping the formation of Ghana – formerly the Gold Coast – as the first post-colonial, self-governed African state. His role in highlighting the evils of colonialism was one of his many achievements.
“My grandfather, Charlie Lahr, was a German-born Jewish anarchist who moved to England in 1906.
“He ran a bookshop in Camden Town and it became the haunt of Jomo Kenyatta, CLR James – and George Padmore.
“CLR James, who had been at the same school as Padmore in Trinidad, learned his politics at my grandfather’s bookshop. It was a place of debate and discussion. My grandfather would give books away – he was more interested in spreading knowledge than making a living.“George would come to his house for Sunday lunch.”
Esther Leslie
Padmore lived in the block – built as industrial dwellings – from 1941 to 1957, with his partner Dorothy Pizer. It became a key meeting place for left wingers, pan-Africanists, and anti-colonial movements. Letters from the likes of Richard Wright and WEB DuBois would drop through its letterbox.
When Kwame Nkrumah came to London in 1945 to study law, Padmore met him at the station and gave him a place to stay. It was the beginning of a long friendship. Nkrumah returned to Ghana as the country’s first president in 1956 and asked Padmore to join him.
Padmore’s memory is marked by a Blue Plaque on his Somers Town flat – and his legacy lives on wherever there lingers the injustice of empire.
“A journalist, radical activist, and theoretician, George Padmore did more than perhaps any other single individual to shape the theory and discourse of Pan-African anti-imperialism in the first half of the twentieth century.
“Born Malcolm Nurse in Trinidad in 1901, Padmore moved to the United States in 1925 to study at Fisk and Howard Universities. In 1928 he dropped out of Howard’s law school and joined the American Communist Party. Quickly rising in Party ranks as an expert on race and imperialism, Padmore moved to Moscow, USSR in 1929 to head the Comintern’s International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers and to edit the Negro Worker. In 1931 he published the influential pamphlet, “The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers”. In 1933 the Comintern suspended publication of the Negro Worker and disbanded the Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers, prompting Padmore to split acrimoniously with the Party. In subsequent years Padmore would become a fervent anti-Communist, denouncing the Comintern’s alleged manipulation of black freedom struggles in his 1956 book Pan-Africanism or Communism? However, throughout his life, he continued to unite with activists and trade unionists on the radical left around the issue of anti-colonialism.
“Padmore settled in London, UK in 1936. There he helped foster a radical milieu of Pan-Africanist intellectuals that included Padmore’s childhood friend, the Trotskyist theorist C.L.R. James. In 1936 Padmore published How Britain Rules Africa, followed a year later by Africa and World Peace. Along with I.T.A. Wallace-Johnson, Padmore and James founded the International African Service Bureau in 1937. Padmore guided the bureau through the late 1930s and early 1940s until in merged into the Pan-African Federation in 1944. He was a principal organizer of the Manchester Pan-African Congress in 1945, which helped lay the foundation for postwar African colonial liberation movements. Throughout this period Padmore’s articles and essays were printed regularly in the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and The Crisis, as well as in newspapers throughout Britain, West Africa, and the Caribbean. Padmore’s international journalism and other writings linked African American struggles with liberation movements in Africa and with African Diaspora peoples around the world and thus had a profound effect on the contours of black political thought.
“George Padmore spent his final years in newly independent Ghana as an advisor and mentor to Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. He died in London in 1959.”
Padmore, George. 1941. “Whither the West Indies” Labor Action, 5(29).
This is an interview with Mr. Raz Finni of Moss Side in Manchester, conducted by Robin Grinter and Anna Ward on 18 July 1995. Mr. Finni has been a businessman and shopkeeper in Manchester for many years and a resident in Manchester since the end of WWII. Padmore was an important figure in helping to organise the Manchester Pan-African Congress in 1945.
Photo of George Padmore.
Plaque for George Padmore in Somers Town.
Through his door came anti-colonial activists from across the world, including his friends and political allies C.L.R. James, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Amy Ashwood Garvey, T. Ras Makonnen, I.T.A Wallace-Johnson and Chris Braithwaite.
No. 22 Cranleigh Street served as the Headquarters for the International African Service Bureau in the 1940s, which made the British public aware of injustices under colonial rule in Africa, proposed reforms and made links between African and British trades unions.
As Nubian Jak said, it was there he plotted the:
“unravelling of British Colonial rule in West Africa and the Carribean”.
Paul Boateng at the unveiling, said many often visted Padmore here, said, this was a “open city… a place where politicians and activists came and mixed together”.
As the BBC, who filmed the event at the time, reported, “history was conceived in this unassuming corner of London.”
Raz Finni recalls the time he met Padmore.
NORTH
RADICALS
SLOGAN: Unravelling of British Colonial rule in West Africa and the Caribbean
George Padmore
History was conceived in this unassuming corner of London when the West Indies came to Somers Town via George Padmore from Trinidad, part of the then British West Indies, lived at 22 Cranleigh St from 1941 to 1957, with partner and collaborator Dorothy Pizer.
Author and journalist arguing for the cause of Pan-Africanism and independence from colonial rule. In 1957, Padmore became political adviser to Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah.
Through his door came anti-colonial activists from across the world, including political allies C.L.R. James and others.
“It was in his [George Padmore’s] neat little flat in Cranleigh House, near Mornington Crescent, London, that I was to spend many evenings, lasting until the early hours of the morning, in the company of such fighters as Jomo Kenyatta, Richard Wright, Ras Makonnen, Peter Koinange, Peter Abraham, C. L. R. James, Dudley Thompson, Yacoub Osman, Burnham, and, latterly, Kwame Nkrumah.”
Joe Appiah, The Autobiography of an African Patriot (New York: Praeger, 1990), p. 159.
DETAILS
In the 1940s, he made the British public aware of injustices under colonial rule in Africa, proposed reforms, and made links between African and British trade unions.
“Many of the statements and pamphlets, as well as the correspondence with which leaders of the British colonies in Africa combated the policies of the Colonial Office in London, were drafted at the dining table of 22 Cranleigh Street. It was also the venue at which George Padmore organised the 5th Pan-African Conference in Manchester in 1945.”
Decisions taken at this crucial conference led to the independence of African countries. Through Padmore, Somers Town is glimpsed as a place of migration and radicalism.
“(…) open city… a place where politicians and activists came and mixed together”
(Paul Boateng at the unveiling of the plaque to Padmore.)
His and his comrades’ actions overwrite the older local history of British connections to the Caribbean with people, their wealth gained through their parents’ slave owning. These people lived in the large houses on Oakley Square and Harrington Square and thereabouts during the 1850s, and twenty years after the abolition of slavery in the 1830s, lived comfortable lives on the compensation granted to them for their property losses.
IMAGES
Edited photo of George Padmore
Photo by Diana Foster of Ghanaian local residents admiring the plaque in Cranleigh Street. Frankie Binney and Lord Eric.